The Ninth Circle.

In the ninth Bolgia, sitting on a cold metal folding chair under the cast of one naked lamp, your cheeks poked full of dry rice, you wait.

Here’s a special place for you, the doctor says, affixing wires to fingertips, fingertips which dance atop a worn table, tapping the prevaricate rhythm of your vibrating nervous system.

Your thoughts, they walk wide circles. Around and around again, these thoughts come to pass the same decisions, the effects of which open in your imagination like a deeply infected wound: pussing, leaking. Back round the bend of the same circle, slowly the wound heals: inflaming, proliferating, remodelling, the tissue matures into a hard cast of time and skin, a reddened protective layer. Fingering the scab, you are relieved. But another pass around and its broken open again, fluid trickling from your ripped up flesh.

In your left hand, the doctor places an egg, its shell smooth and white. You cradle it in the lifeline folds of your palm, your fingers reaching up and around the oval, casting shadow over layers of membrane, the albumen, the vittellus, the truth of simple nourishment.

You start to speak, but dry kernels of rice spill out your open gap. The doctor motions one finger to lips: shh.

On the wall, a projection: your life in reverse. There you are: last week, last month, last year, last decade. A quick clip in time and you are six: the first time you discovered the salty addiction of scandal and schism.

The first time you got away with it.

Pressing stethoscope to bare chest, the doctor listens to your heart. Hiding scribbles on a concealed clipboard, the doctor’s head nods up and down, mouth pursed and concerned.

Here at the gateway to Cocytus, the doctor asks: do you believe in these things?

On the wall, a list: love, blood, honour, hospitality.

You nod, yes: your heart a simple beat, neither quickening nor slowing but instead reaffirming the delusive belief of a deficient conscience.

Here in the layer of the Malebranche, the doctor asks: do you respect these things?

Do you treasure love, blood, honour, hospitality?

Breaking beads just under the row of fine hairs laying flat against your forehead, you cannot focus.

Your hand, it shakes; the egg, it rocks.

Here is a special place for you indeed, the doctor says.

The egg, it falls; the shell, it smashes.

The doctor, he laughs.

xoxo
M. L. H’art

His Old Apartment.

In the back of the closet for 87 years, his life: layered between cling-wrapped bedsheets fresh from the cleaners ten years previous, four crisp, uncut sheets alternating green, black, green, black of Canadian mint one dollar bills; standing between big band pressed vinyl, a forty year yellowed history of National Geographic, heralding new age space age on spines uncracked, covers unbent; tucked behind stale liniments and powdered pill boxes with peeling labels, one pair women’s earrings – gold and emerald sparkling in dull light.

Photos, yellowed and peeling, tucked between unread book pages – scenery blurred by tour bus windows, landmarks and rayon-clad tourists crowding the lens, him riding a desert camel, a skinny sepia smile spread across youthful lips; a sock, tired and threaded, full and pushed to the back of the mahogany drawer, a numismatist’s dream of collected international currency: one coin for one memory; a single postage stamp floating on the shelf, glue dried and flaked, a memory of the shadowed sore spot lacerated on the postcard fallen to the floor, faded words: wish you were here, in cursive scroll.

The liquor cabinet, a passport: tequila, ouzo, sake, scotch. Etched shot glasses, engraved gold chalices, frosted martini glasses – dustbowl passages to old boys’ club deals, when handshakes and paper napkin signatures were the stuff of good business; bank notes and promissory titles on rice-thin paper, faded from forgetfulness.

A scratched mint tin with loose lid, inside the letters R.C.A.F. etched into the wings of lapel pins; a pendant, heavy with time, of a boy kneeling at an alter, the year 1938 inscribed; a locket, inside the photo of a man, young and tanned, smiling and sure.

A blue steel tool box housing crescent and socket and open end and monkey and pipe and torque and mole wrenches, original price tags affixed in place; unopened packages of screws, uncapped glue, unbroken seals on caulking tubes.

A fishing rod, a camping tent, a mosquito net, two kerosene lanterns – all forty years new, all unused.

The apartment: a front.

In the top drawer of the bureau, a stack of photos carefully tucked between the folds of a letter: the locket man in Palm Springs, in Greece, in Japan, in Hawaii, in England, in Vancouver, his beauty of youth a shifting timeline, young to old – the evidence of a true love kept in the back of the closet for a lifetime.

xoxo
M.L. H’art

The Jackhammer Waltz.

Machine gun rattle, the jackhammer bullies each one of my slippery dream thoughts hard into the spring-wet pavement. Sunlight vibrating the length of each rat-tat skips through the cloudy window. It is morning and I am red-wine dry. Smacking stained lips, the sheets shush and rustle as I turn over and over in the covers – a twisted game of hide and seek.

I share my first cup with the construction workers four stories down – leaning against the coerced chain link fence, it bowing under their weight, they raise their indestructible faux-titanium travel mugs their wives and girlfriends wiped out and refilled just that morning as a half hearted cheers when I step out onto the balcony.

“Morning boys,” I mutter, sticky morning breath swirling steam above the lip of my pink mug.

Skyscraper blue glass bounces stretched rainbows of Saturday sun across tired city streetways. A lineup trickles out the door of Money Mart, weekend tired warriors rubbing grubby mitts across crinkled foreheads, eyes squinting back early light, creased post-dated pay checks shoved into flannel shirt pockets.

Trundling traffic takes corners with less urgency. The lights shift slower. No one honks.

Like the sound of wind chimes tickling the backdoor of grandma’s house, the tink of green glass shimmies up the drainpipe. The calculated sorting of glass versus can has begun; the tchick-tchick of shopping cart wheels on winter-worn back alley pavement a race of rattled metal over uneven cracks.

Batonning the fan-belt crescendo screech, I conduct the moving echo of sirens cascading up and down, up and down. The concrete symphony swells and wanes on the dew-wet lips of wind, a compliment to the bellowing chorus of construction holler.

Keeping rhythm with the smacking steps of flip-flop clad feet, the song of spring has arrived downtown.

xoxo,

M.L. H’art